What I am about to do is not give you an expository message that, even a short passage that was read to you, I’m not going to unfold it and march through it, instead I’m going to draw out three ideas from it that I think will help us to address an issue that is extraordinary important issue at our cultural moment. In fact just last month New York Times Magazine wrote a, ran an article, and wrote an article and we all read an article, called The Year we Obsessed About our Identity. It was saying this is the year we are as a culture finally obsessing over identity and so, what’s identity? I think it’s at least two things the way we use the word now. It’s a sense of self and a sense of worth. A sense of self means, there’s got to be a core, a durable core that you identify yourself through all various hats you wear and the various roles you play and the various situations you’re in. You know, so many different situations, so many different places. What is the core that says, that identifies you in every one of those situations. There’s a core durable sense of self and there’s a sense of worth. What makes you feel significant? What makes you confident of your value? And if you have a sense of self and a sense of worth, we say you’ve got a real identity. Now every culture has a way of doing identity formation. Every culture presents to it’s members a way that you get that sense of self and the way you get that sense of worth but it get it across you not in books, in bullet points, it get’s it across through stories, through songs, through slogans and it’s always, always the way you get a self in every particular cultures, it’s always presented as self-evident. That is, this is the way it is. This is just the way it’s done. What I like you to do with me is follow me, actually listen to me for the next few minutes because I like to make our own culture’s way of doing that more visible to you, I think it’s more invisible to almost all of us and one of the reasons that I’m here is to tell you that it’s very easy in our culture today to be a professing Christian, profess faith in Christ and yet let the culture tell you who you are, because you don’t realize that’s what it’s doing, especially ours, I’ll show you why. Here’s the three ideas I like to draw out. One is, you need someone to name you, secondly only the Lord Jesus Christ should be the one who names you, and thirdly He doesn’t do that in the abstract or by laying down His life for you.
First of all, you need someone to name you. The metaphor of the sheep, “the one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep, the gatekeeper opens the gate, the sheepless into his voice.” Uh, you probably heard this before. One of the bible’s main metaphors for human beings is sheep. The Lord is my shepherd. And that that is actually essentially a massive divine insult, that metaphor. Sheep are the most non-self sufficient animals there are. If I want a few more laughs I could give you some stories that you’ve probably heard maybe. But a sheep, they do not know, they can’t get their own food, they don’t even know sometimes the right food if it’s in front of them or not. They can’t find their way home and it’s true that the shepherd names the sheep, gives the sheep a name and the sheep answers to it. Now our culture absolutely repudiates this metaphor. It recoils from it in horror. The idea that someone else names you, that we don’t find our own identity or we don’t create our own identity, there’s difference of opinion in a culture whether we discover our identity, we create our identity but what’s what our culture tells you and the idea that someone else names you, somebody else assigns an identity is just considered absolutely oppressive and horrible. Why? Let’s dig down a bit. In traditional cultures, traditional cultures gave you a sense of self and a sense of worth because traditional cultures were not individualistic, they were more communal and so you lived in a family and you lived in a community and in the family and the community there were certain roles and you were essentially were assigned a role and you could consider yourself a good and admirable person, you could get yourself a sense of self and a sense of worth by simply sublimating your own individual interests for the good of your family, the good of the community, your people and by fulfilling their roles, that’s how you did it. So, in those cultures not only in the past but even today in other parts of the world besides the west, if you ask me, “well who are you?” The very question isn’t usually a question that people usually struggle with but if you ask them who you are they would say I’m a son or a daughter. I’m a father or a mother, something like that. Because in those cultures, honor is bestowed on you by the community when you sublimate your individual interests for the good of the family and the community. Our culture, western culture is not just different, it is exactly the opposite. In our culture, the way in which you find yourself or get a sense of self and worth is you look inside. Nobody should tell you from the outside, you look inside, you look deep inside you and you find a certain dream, you find certain feelings, you find certain intuitions and then you unfold those and express and that’s how you find yourself. So some years ago I remember watching a Star Trek Next Generation episode and Jean Luc Picard is saying to some young guy I think I remember the character’s name but I won’t say it because somebody is going to flag me on it. But some young character who wanted to go to Starfleet Academy which is the Wheaton college of the future. And he wants to go to Starfleet academy and they, at one point Jean Luc Picard is trying to say, “look I don’t want you to go because I want you to go, I don’t want you to go for your mother, you should only go if you want to go, and you shouldn’t do anything of these things to please me or please your mother, you should do it because it pleases you, because of what you want to do, you must not get your identity “ he didn’t quite go there but he came close, “from what I say about you or your mother says, you have to bestow honor and dignity on yourself.” “Doesn’t matter what he, she thinks, doesn’t matter what I think, it matters of what you think.” That’s the modern approach. Robert Bellah and The Habits of the Heart and that team of sociologists back in the 80’s called it “expressive individualism”. And so let’s summarize it, briefly. In traditional cultures you actually do self denial, that’s the heroic narrative. Self denial, sublimate your individual interest for the good of the family or the community. Our heroic narrative is utterly different. You look inside yourself, you decide what your dreams are, who you are, what you want to do and then you, the heroic narrative for us is self assertion. Not only self assertion, especially what your family or your society says. It’s more heroic to say “this is who I am, I don’t care what my family says, I don’t care what the society says, I’m going to be who I am.” That’s exactly the opposite by the way, you know in traditional cultures, that’s called villainy, in our culture it’s heroism. You know, you’ve got, some of your professors will like these examples, like the Battle of Maldon the old English poem which is talking about the great battle and at one point, one side realizes they’re about to be wiped out, that their going to lose, do they run? Oh no. One of the guys, I think their name was Brithnoth, he shakes his spear of ash and he calls to his brethren soldiers and he says “thought must be harder, hearts be the keener, minds be the sterner and our strength lessens. Here lies our prince all hewn, I will not away but I myself be side my Lord so loved a man think to lie.” You know so forget about saving your skin, forget about anything else, be loyal to your people, make a last stand, fight to the last man and there’s another piece of immortal poetry that more recently goes like this, “climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, till to find your dream.” And you might remember at that point that that’s being sung by a woman who was part of a community that had taken vows and is being told, leave the community to find yourself. And those are the two approaches. Now before I give you criticism which I will of our culture’s approach to identity formation, let me just say something and I got to be brief, it’s extraordinarily easy especially for evangelical Christians to beat up on an individualism as the great villain of all things. First of all the idea of human rights, the idea of the dignity of every single human being, that whole idea arose in the west, it did not arise in other parts of the world, it arose in parts of the world that believed the bible and what it said about every human being made in the image of God. At 1880 my grandfather was born in Italy, a small town outside of Napels and when he was about fifteen, sixteen, he said to his father, who was a potter and his grandfather had made pots, and his great grandfather made pots and he said, “I don’t think I want to make pots.” And the father said, I guess my great grandfather said to him, “well, you have to”, he said “why?” “Because nobody in town will give you a job because everybody knows that our family makes pots that’s that.” “Well” he said, “what if I go to another town”, “no they wouldn’t give you a job at all there because they know you belong in that town and why would you be working here, you belong back in that town and to make pots.” And my grandfather who I never knew but my mother told me, said there’s only three things he could do, he could go to the military, he could be a priest, he could make pots, or he could go to America and he did, he went to America. And I’m glad he did and I’m glad I live in a place where I don’t have to do exactly what my father said, did, I could move to another town if I want to and if you say “well of course, well then you like individualism by the way” and I’m not sure frankly in spite of the fact it came out of the African American church, I’m not sure, that the civil rights movement of 1960’s would have been successful if the rest of America hadn’t started moving to the direction of individualism. So I mean before we start to stay this is the worst thing in the world, it’s not the worst thing in the world, however, it has gone to a place where lots and lots and lots of voices are talking about the erosion of our community. So only Robert Bellah but Charles Taylor, In a Secular Age, he writes this, he says “communities are eroding, families, neighborhood and even the polity, people are less willing to participate to do their bit, they’re less trusting of others, indeed they’re less trusting of any institutions or authority of any kind” and Taylor makes a point and so does Robert Bellah, this point, in the past and other cultures, you made money and you had sex to build community. In our culture, you make money and have sex to find an identity, an individual identity. Those are radically different and making money, going into business and making money, and expressing your sexuality, even that term, expressing your sexuality shows that we’re today here. That if you’re making money and having sex to find an identity as opposed to building a community, you’re going to do it radically different ways! But I’m not even going to go in that direction. I’m going to show you why not that this harms community, this approach to identity formation but I’m going to show you five reasons it’s not going to work for you, personally.
I’m going to be individualistic for this rest of the talk. I’m just going to assume, I want you to see why this won’t work for you. Here’s five reasons. Number one, this idea, what is this idea, expressive individualism that you look inside, you find your own deepest desires’ intuitions, you look at your own deepest feelings and then you express those no matter what society or family or anybody else says. That approach won’t work for five reasons, number one, it’s an incoherent identity, if you’re trying to create an identity like that, how so? Because look deep into your heart and you’ll see your deepest feelings and they contradict each other. Oh I love this person, I want to be with this person, I love this career, I want to be in this career, guess what, lots of times those two things are not compatible. Well I have to find the deeper love, oh give me a break. You love them both. They’re both important. What makes you think for example that you’re inner feelings are coherent? And so wonderfully ordered? They’re not! Francis Spufford in his book Unapologetic puts it like this; he says, you, he’s talking to you, us, “you are a being whose once make no sense, they don’t harmonize, your desires deep down discordantly arranged so that you want truly to possess and you want truly not to possess at the very same time. You are equipped. you’ll eventually realize for farce or even tragedy for much more than you are for happy endings.” If you don’t believe that yet, you’re very young, but in the other hand, I’m talking at a college so why did I say that. Secondly an identity that’s based on looking inside is not only incoherent, it’s unstable, remember I said a part of an identity is to have a durable core? So there’s something that’s true of you all the time? Well if you look on the inside, that’s always changing. Lewis Smedes, the author of the last generation, he was a christian author, he had a book, probably an essay on marriage and he said, “my wife has been married to five men, and all of them were me” and he says basically, essentially goes on to say, “but what was it that bond them all together?” A couple things, the vows that were made for him the day of his baptism and two the vows that he made the day he married her. So he says the one thing that was always the core through all those five kind of people I was, was I said “I’ll be there for you, no matter what.” See if you’re looking on the inside, that changed all the time and you know that. In fact I could even, look, those of you who are twenty, do you remember your fifteen year old self, remember what an idiot you were? Ok, it slows down a little bit. But I want you to know your thirty year old self will think you’re an idiot now and your forty five year old self will think your thirty year old self is an idiot which means? Class? You’re always a fool. You’re always an idiot. You’re always a jerk. I cannot tell my wife that that's what you applied for but anyways. She says “really?” “what were their SAT scores?” Anyway. It’s unstable, it’s always changing, that can’t be the base of your identity. Number three though, it’s a losery. It’s an illusion to say that my identity comes from my inner feelings. People say that all the time, this is who I am. What do you mean who? These feelings I have, this is who I am and nobody’s telling me! See, Jean Luc Picard. Don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You decide who you are. That’s an illusion, you can’t do it, why not? I’ll tell you why, I already begun to tell you. Because you got discordantly arranged different kinds of feelings, you’re going to have to choose. Your identity is not going to come from your feelings. It’s going to come from the feelings you choose. Why are you choosing some and not others? So imagine twelve hundred years ago, the Anglo-Saxon warrior walking through the streets of something, someplace, not here by the way and he looks into his heart and sees, he sees a couple of very deep feelings. One of them is this. He sees aggression. He just loves smashing people. He just absolutely, if somebody gets in his way, he just loves killing them. And he looks at himself and he sees that aggressive impulse and he says, that’s me, I like that, that’s me, I’m going to express that. On the other hand, he also sees another feeling deep in his heart and this would’ve happened of course twelve hundred years ago and the Anglo-Saxon world, he sees aggression, he wants to kill people but he also sees same-sex attraction. What’s he going to say? He’s going to say, that’s not me. Nope that’s not me. We’re going to squash that. Ok, now young man is walking on the street of Manhattan today, he looks into his heart and he sees aggression. He just likes to smash people, what is he going to say? I need therapy. I need anger management. He’s going to look into his heart and sees same sex attraction and he says that’s me. What’s going on? Here’s what’s going on. The Anglo-Saxon warrior is in a culture, it’s called a shame and honor culture. And that culture was based on the idea that society will fall apart if it doesn’t respect strength. So the best thing you could do for society if somebody crosses is to kill them. Otherwise the social fabric will unravel, I mean you know strength has to be respected. Shame and honor culture. And as a result his culture was telling him, some of his feelings are really him and some of them, they are it. This is you and this is sort of, it, this thing I’ve got to handle. But you, guess what, our modern culture is doing the same thing, and now you’re beginning to realize something, you’re not just looking in your heart and you’re not just being yourself, you have a grid, a morally, charged, value-laden, grid, that you are laying down on your heart and your judging which things are you and which things are not. Frankly they’re all you in a sense that they’re all in you. But you are deciding which ones to identify which, with, and which one you’re not and who’s giving you that grid? Ah, you’re not making it up. Your culture is giving it to you. And then you're walking away and saying, “oh, I’m just expressing myself”, no you’re just being exactly what your culture wants. It’s an illusion to think you could name yourself. It’s an illusion to think inside and decide who you want to be. Somebody is going to tell you how to sift through what’s on the inside. Somebody is. Number four. It’s huge pressure, I said listen, the way identity, the identity formation that your culture is giving you right now, it’s incoherent, it’s unstable, it’s an illusion, it actually isn’t what it claims to be, fourth it’s crushing. Alain de Botton, a secular atheist french philosopher who wrote a book some years ago called Status Anxiety. He makes the case that even though those older, non-western cultures were suffocating, you had to be whatever your parents told you to be, that was it. That was suffocating. But at least if you were just being a good son or a good daughter that didn’t have the same pressure as modern western culture which says, you have to have a dream, you have to decide who you want to be and you’ve got to achieve it. And he points out that we’re actually, the irony is, is we’re supposed to be free from guilt, remember Rob Reiner’s character in Bullets Over Broadway, the Woody Allen movie where he said “guilt is petty bourgeois crap, an artist creates his own moral universe.” And that’s how we’re supposed to say, we’re supposed to say hey I have to decide what is right or wrong for me, the irony of course is that you have to achieve your own identity. You know remember Harold Abrams, I don’t know the real Harold Abrams but the Harold Abrams of the Chariots of Fire, why are you after that gold medal in the hundred yard dash? And he says to his girlfriend, “when that gun goes off, I’ve got ten seconds to justify my existence”. And the fact of the matter is, since we don’t look outward to God, we don’t look to our family, we don’t look to any, we look to ourselves in order to achieve this identity, that sounds like freedom, it is, but it’s a crushing burden because now you’ve got to do it. Benjamin Nugent in an essay in New York Times said this, “when good writing was my only goal in life, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth.” And then he said, “for this reason I wasn’t able to read my own writing well, I couldn’t tell whether something I just written was good or bad, I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I would’ve liked to have seen or what I have feared to see.” In other words, when you make anything your identity. When you make a career your identity or a particular body your identity, or a particular love relationship your identity, those things stop being good things! And they start to crush you! In other words, he wanted to write that’s a good thing, he should’ve written but when the writing was his identity, he said “I made the quality of my work, the measure of my worth and I couldn’t, to feel sane I had to look at anything I wrote and said “this is great”. So I couldn’t actually look at it realistically, and I couldn’t certainly hear it’s criticism.” It’s crushing. It’s absolutely crushing. And of course you also do it with love relationships but you know that. I don’t have to go into that. Here’s one last thing. This identity is number one incoherent, number two unstable, number three it’s an illusion, number four it’s crushing, number five it’s actually excluding. You know the place where C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says we’re not really proud of having money, we’re proud of having more money than the next person. We’re not really proud of being smart, we’re proud of being smarter. If you are the best violinist in your little town in Texas and then you go to New York City and you get off at Pen Station and you realize the person playing the violin and begging and people are throwing you know money in the violin case is better than you. And suddenly that high self-esteem you had, because you were the best violinist in your town goes down to the toilet why? Because ultimately any identity that’s achieve, rather than received has to be excluding. In other words you feel better because these other people aren’t as good as you, these other people aren’t enlighten as you, these other people aren’t liberal as you, these people aren’t as conservative as you, these people aren’t hard working as you, these people aren’t insight as you. That’s how you feel good about yourself, by looking at other people and just, and trashing them and that’s how it’s going to work. So what kind of identity do we need? Here’s what we need. You can’t take yourself and bless yourself and name yourself. You need recognition. You need somebody from outside to come in and speak to you. I know we say, “no, no, no, we don’t need that”, we are social beings, we are relational beings. We have to do that! Even when I see people online say, “I have done this and my family’s rejected me but I know who I am and this is who I am” and suddenly thousands of people on social media are cheering them and the just got, they didn’t just say, “I have decided who I want to be”, no, they have a new set of cheerleaders. They just took the old set of cheerleaders and just said, forget it, I want to be part of this set. You have to have a word from outside, somebody is going to name you and let me go a little further. And what kind of person should this be, what kind of people should this be? Well, you need the love and you need the approval and you need the esteem of someone you esteem if you’re going to have any self-esteem. This person whoever it is should not be someone who can ever let you down or disallusion you. If you get your self worth from the academy or from the art world or from individuals or from a loved one or something like that, what happens when they disallusion you which they might? Where does your self-worth go? This also can’t be a person whose fickle, somebody who’s up and down with you depending how well you perform. Right? And also, you know another thing is, this is gotta be a person whom you esteem enormously. What kind of person should that be? According to this text it says this, Jesus says, “he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out, I’m the good shepherd”. I’m the good shepherd, I know my sheep and my sheep know me. Think about this. If it’s really true that the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards. That you only have, only if you have the esteem of someone you would you esteem you have self-esteem. Only if you have the adoration of someone who you adores you, that’s heaven. Then to know that God loves, the Lord of the universe loves you, that would have to give you the most powerful basis for a stable identity possible and secondly, is it based on your performance? No. If it’s not based on your performance, it’s not only stable but you don’t need to look down at your nose at everybody else around you. In other words, the excluding aspect of your identity goes away. So how do you get that? Now it says, the Lord Jesus Christ names you and there’s lots of places in the bible that talk about that, I mean you’re adopted into God’s family. That’s a new identity right? You are citizen of heaven. Philippians 3:20, that’s a new identity right? You are a member of, in a sense a new people, that’s a 1 Peter 2:10. That’s a new identity right? You’re united to Christ, that’s a new identity right? But I gotta say when I just talk to you about it like that, in fact when I just talk to myself about it like that, it’s kind of abstract. But Jesus doesn’t name us by simply showing up “poof” and giving us a new name, or saying you’re mine. He dies for us. Some years ago a girl in my youth group who was depressed, her parents said please come in and talk to her, she’s depressed, she’s about fifteen years old. And I went through her identity, I said “you know you’re a christian and you’re going to heaven, you got this, you got that” and here’s what she said, “yeah I’m a Christian, I’m glad I’m a Christian but what good is it if no boy will ask you out, in fact they won’t even look at you”. Now here’s what I realized at that moment, your identity is like a deck of cards, there’s a whole lot of things in your identity. She was a Christian, it was in her deck, but it wasn’t at the top, it wasn’t the most important thing, it wasn’t the thing that she actually dealt frankly if you’re going to use the metaphor. In other words, it wasn’t the thing she was actually dealing but the point is, a boy, male approval, if I have male approval then I have my identity. You see she was a Christian and Jesus was in the deck, but it wasn’t at the top of the deck. What get’s Jesus Christ at the top of the deck? So you lose the excluding aspect of the modern identity so you have something stable, so you have something coherent so you know who you are. So you have an identity not achieved which is crushing but received. How do you do that? A, you gotta believe He died for you, it says so, “I lay down my life my sheep”, He doesn’t show up and give you a name, He dies for you. You not only have to believe He died for you which I would assume lots of you do, it’s gotta go to your imagination. It’s got to be the aesthetic core of your life. You gotta learn how when you struggling with what the culture says about your identity, because you’re not good looking enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re not having enough transformative sex, you’re not this, you’re not that. You gotta know how to pull out your identity in Christ and push it to the top of the deck and you do that generally through imagination. I had a friend of my some years ago, they realized he was extraordinarily upset about the fact that he went to the kindest school, and he had the kind of background and all of his colleagues had made a tremendous amount of money and high status and he was in a missionary ministry job and didn’t have that kind of status and he realized it was getting at him, he realized he was actually, he needed to put Jesus identity at the top of his deck, as it were. And he suddenly one day was reading in Philippians chapter 2, where it says, in the Old King James, though he was in the form of God, He didn’t count equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but He made Himself of no reputation. And it went to the man’s heart. And he said, “Jesus Christ lost everything, He was crucified outside the gate. He made himself of no reputation. He did that for me! Why in the world am I worried about my status and my reputation”, and he was freed. So what he did was he took it to the center of his imagination, not just here I believe it. If you don’t get it in your imagination, and if you don’t do it regularly through worship, through thinking, through applying it at the moment, it doesn’t go to the top and you’re back in where everybody else is, cultural captivity. Don’t go there. When I, when I was a very unsure about myself person, thinking I wanted to go into ministry but not sure if I can make it, I met a guy who was a, Edmund Clowney who was a alumni, alumnus of Wheaton College and he was the president of Westminster Seminary. I heard him speak at a conference, I walked up and met him. Two years later, when I was really down in the dumps about my prospects, I heard he was speaking nearby, I went and I heard him speak and afterwards I walked up and I said, “hello doctor Clowney, I met you before, you don’t remember me” but he says, “oh I know you” he named me, he named me. He said, “let’s go get a soda and talk. Want to find out what’s going on with your life.” Just changed everything and I realized about a year later, if a man, who was a great guy, by naming me like that, not even dying for me, just taking his whole afternoon for me. You know the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards, if someone you esteem, esteems you, that’s only way to get self-esteem, he wasn’t dying for me, he was sacrificing some time, if a just a good man names you and it can be that transformative, how are you getting through your imagination what Jesus Christ has done for you down to a naming level in your heart? Do it, it’s your only hope.
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